ShoreTel Named Best IP Telephony Provider for Sixth Year in a Row

Updated: May 05, 2011

ShoreTel, Inc. (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated Unified Communications (UC), today announced that for the sixth year in a row ShoreTel has been named the Best IP Telephony Provider in the Nemertes PilotHouse Awards - Top Providers, IP Telephony 2009. This year, the awards rated 39 IP Telephony vendors and included 1,393 participants. Unique in the industry, Nemertes bases its results entirely on the experiences of IP-telephony decision-makers.

According to the Nemertes report, ShoreTel "has created a solid customer experience. ShoreTel has scored at the top in every ratings category since Nemertes began tracking IP-telephony vendor performance six years ago. This year is no different as ShoreTel won every ratings category. ShoreTel's key driver continues to be its value, with a 4.31 rating. Customers routinely praise their purchases of ShoreTel gear as providing an exceptional set of features and a highly resilient architecture at both lower upfront and ongoing costs than its competitors. Its distributed architecture provides for redundancy at an affordable price."

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

• IP telephony decision-makers rated their vendors on a scale of 1 to 5 in the following categories: Value, Technology, Customer Service, Ease of Implementation and Troubleshooting, and Management Tools.
• Overall Score: ShoreTel had the best overall score at 4.05. ShoreTel was the only vendor to score above 4. "ShoreTel's stellar reputation has
•  captured the attention of its larger competitors who view ShoreTel as a growing threat," the report stated.
• Value: The Value rating measures what customers think about what they are getting for their money. "Are they getting their bang for the buck?" With a Value rating of 4.31, ShoreTel came in far ahead of the competition. The next closest vendors managed a rating of only 3.77.
• Technology: ShoreTel customers also praised ShoreTel's technology, often noting how easy it is to expand the system or to add new sites.
• Customer Service: ShoreTel was top for Customer Service, which is based on how customers feel about how their vendors serve them, especially in the areas of response time to problems, account representative service, the RFP process, and warranty issues.
• Ease of Implementation and Troubleshooting: In this category, IT staff rate ease of installation and detecting and fixing problems. "This can be one of the biggest pain points or one of the most pleasant surprises of a new technology implementation. Once again, ShoreTel wins the highest score with a 3.92..." according to the report.
• Management Tools: While many vendors are challenged to provide usable management tools, ShoreTel easily earned the highest rating for the sophistication of the tools included with the system.

QUOTES

John W. Combs, Chairman and CEO, ShoreTel:

"We are very proud of earning this highly prestigious award for the sixth year in a row. At ShoreTel, we measure customer satisfaction with the same rigor and frequency as we measure revenue. Our internal surveys show, and Nemertes confirms, that ShoreTel continues to deliver world-class customer satisfaction. ShoreTel partners and employees understand that every decision maker puts their job on the line when it comes to the performance and reliability of a new communications system, and we work together to ensure that every decision maker and their team are heroes within their organization after their ShoreTel system is installed. We would like to offer a special thank you to ShoreTel's growing list of raving fans for their willingness to spread the word."

Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research:

"The top metric for extremely successful VoIP deployments is customer satisfaction. Those companies that deliver a high level of value are poised to succeed."

Insights from the Nemertes PilotHouse Awards - Top Providers, IP Telephony 2009:

"The common thread among participants that favor ShoreTel is its value. Low prices, a broad set of features, scalability, strong customer service, and relatively less complicated deployment and troubleshooting requirements all contribute to ShoreTel's win."

"ShoreTel's customers praise its technology (4.15), as well. They often note the ability to easily scale by simply adding new switches as they add new sites or expand existing sites. 'We found ShoreTel provided a better solution than its competitors, especially in the contact center,' says the director of telecom at a professional-services firm that has deployed about 200 end-points."

"'We picked ShoreTel because of its enthusiastic VARs, low cost, wide support for SIP-trunking service providers, UC features, and the scalability to grow as we grow,' says the director of telecom for a nationwide engineering firm."

About ShoreTel, Inc.

ShoreTel, Inc., (NASDAQ: SHOR) is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions based on its award-winning IP business phone system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in Austin, Texas, United Kingdom, Sydney, Australia and Munich, Germany. For more information, visit www.shoretel.com.